You could translate “chinoiserie” as “Chinese…ish,” if you want. It’s a cultural form of infatuation with the transfer student–in retrospect it may come to seem childish and superficial. But initially, there’s a flush of novelty, a flash of curiosity, and a fleshing out of another inner life through trial and error, mostly error. (In a similar way, knock-offs of products are usually not very good, most fail, and a few develop into something so good they rival the original–witness Japan’s whisky.) Continue reading Turandot, the Music of The Nightingale, and Magic of Chinoiserie